Struggling with frugality, debt, parenting, and weight

December 2015 Early Retirement Progress

We contributed $6,084.27 this month to our retirement accounts, and we lost $7,710.85 in investment value this month. (This is only until 12/31/15, and doesn’t include the horrendous results from January 2016)

2015 year was a loss overall for investment gains/value. We only lost $141.09 though, which really isn’t that much, and was heavily out-weighed by our contributions. We contributed more than my 2015 take home pay, and just slightly less than my take home pay plus the 18k that was taken out for contributions. So, realistically, we could live on just Dad’s take home salary, but we wouldn’t be able to contribute near as much to retirement (only his contributions). We could live on my take home if we reduced expenses just slightly and/or didn’t contribute the legal max to my 403(b).

2015 had a lot of ups and downs in the market, being mostly up in the early part of the year, and mostly down in the latter half. We’re still going to contribute as much as we can in 2016, which right now is looking like approximately the same amount. We want to save for a deck on the house before we really contribute that much, and our guesstimate for that means not much left for extra retirement contributions in 2016 – but then 2017 will have a lot more!

2015 Totals

In 2015 we contributed $66449.15 (94.93% of our goal of 70k), and we lost $141.09 in investment value (-0.59% of our planned total).